It’s a current truth that you cannot sit down in a trendy restaurant without being confronted by pork belly shouting at you from the menu.

Slow-roast, braised or hotpot — not since Bruce Willis’s girlfriend wished for a pot belly in Pulp Fiction has any kind of belly (apart from a flat one) been quite so fashionable.

Searching Google for pork belly is a surprising and culturally broadening exercise. First you come across an episode scheduled on the cult food show Iron Chef entitled Pork Belly Wars. Since the chefs on this programme would undoubtedly cast terror into the heart of Gordon Ramsay on his fiercest day, it would be fascinating to see how a battle over a 4kg slab of fatty meat could play out.

Next is the site of a Canadian blues band, Pork Belly Futures, which the Montreal Gazette describes as “literary blues tunes for people who have read Hemingway and Atwood”. Pretentious? Mais non!

Best of all comes next: information about how to trade pork belly futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I was so taken aback by the idea that the now ubiquitous dish du jour is traded as a commodity that I had to ring my dad, who has weathered several decades in finance, to check I wasn’t being dim. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Pork bellies are the bellwether of the American economy. In fact I went to dinner the other night at China Tang and was astonished to find it on the menu. It never occurred to me you could eat it.”

Pork belly is, as you’d imagine, the cut of meat across the underside of a pig. It is principally cured to make streaky bacon. While its glorification has been more recent here, it has always been recognised across the seas. In Italy it is cured and, as pancetta, forms the basis for many pasta dishes. In Asia it’s braised as an oriental hotpot, while in France it’s the only ingredient apart from haricots blancs that everyone can agree goes into a cassoulet.

Belly is a very cheap cut because of its high fat to meat ratio. It’s for this reason that pork belly makes such a wonderful cut for slow cooking in any form — as the meat gently cooks, the layers of fat start to render, leaving the interleaved flesh meltingly tender.

For a crispy yet melting roast, ask for a cut of belly known as the “thick end” — it’s so beautifully fatted that it’s almost impossible to overcook. Slash the skin and rub well with salt, pepper and thyme. Concentrate on making sure the crackling is right and the meat will look after itself. Alternatively, braise at a simmer in water with sherry, soy sauce, fresh ginger, star anise, cinnamon and lots of garlic — and I mean lots.

Simon Hopkinson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have great recipes for this aromatic winter treat, best eaten with fat white noodles. Don’t forget that rack of spare ribs is also a belly cut, and can be cooked till sticky in barbecue marinade in a medium-hot oven.

The fashion for cooking and eating pork belly flies in the face of every current nutritional trend apart from that of Dr Robert Atkins. Pork belly is, quite frankly, more fat than meat — a lot more. As winter approaches, you could think of it as a way of keeping warm.

However you approach it, I suspect it’s going to be a rewarding winter for the pork belly trader. I’m no tipster, but I reckon you could go long on pork bellies until spring without much risk.

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